• Kolossos@lemmy.world
    7·
    4 hours ago

    Astrid Lindgren, her books are translated to 95 different languages and sold over 160 million copies. Probably the worlds most beloved children’s book author.

  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    I don’t have ‘best female author of all time’ but I do have favorite writers some of which happen to be female. I don’t usually split them by their sex (nor by their height, distaste for bananas, or whatever) as for me they’re all in the same ‘people who have a great time staining paper with ink making me a happy reader’ league but here it is, in absolutely no order beside the first two, as there is them and then there is all the others:

    • Virginia Woolf (the only reason I would love to be able to travel in time is to meet her),
    • Jane Austen,
    • Edit: (how could I forget) Emily Dickinson!
    • Sylvia Plath,
    • Shirley Jackson (if you have not already, go read The Haunting of Hill House, it’s considered a classic for reasons),
    • la marquise de Sévigné (she wrote letters and they make for a great read, no idea if it’s available in English),
    • Margaret Atwood (imho she deserves a Nobel Prize, next to Woolf and Austen),
    • Mary Shelley (like mentioned by others already, she well deserves to be read and would still have a lot to teach to some contemporary authors too, imho).
    • I love reading Lizza Tuttle. Her horror short stories are different.
    • In the same vein, I also quite like Mélanie Fazzi (who is also a translator of some of Tuttle’s stories, btw). But I can’t find that much more female writers in that specific genre (a lot more males do come to my mind).

    Being French, I realize I have not listed that many French female writers I would consider a favorite. But they are a few I would consider excellent read nonetheless:

    • La comtesse de Ségur (one of my childhood companion next to, say, Verne and Doyle),
    • Simone de Beauvoir,
    • (very) few pages of Marguerite Duras,
    • Fred Vargas.
    • To which I would also add Pauline Réage, because I think her ‘Histoire d’O’ is well worth reading for anyone into erotica.
    • At one time, I also quite liked Joëlle Wintrebert (scifi) but I have not felt like reading her for a very long time so I could not tell.
  • eightpix@lemmy.world
    21·
    11 hours ago

    Fiction

    • Ursula K. LeGuin

    • Octavia Butler

    • Margaret Atwood

    • Tui T. Sutherland (J Fic)

    • Suzanne Collins (YA)

    • Lois Lowry (YA)

    Non-Fiction

    • Naomi Klein

    • Margaret Atwood (Massey Lecture)

    • Angela Y. Davis

    • Tanya Talaga

    • bell hooks

    • Robin Wall Kimmerer

  • ChuckTheMonkey@fedia.io
    18·
    13 hours ago

    No love for Jane Austen? Some of her works are all time classic. They could probably compete with top 10 literature work of 17th-18th century.

    Another author that’s under appreciated would be Gertrude Stein.

    • Sergio@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      11 hours ago

      Yeah, Jane Austen’s easily one of the top 20 English novelists of all time, and one of my personal favorites. She gets kind of a mixed appreciation these days bc the movies made from her novels usually focus on the romance (often in a way that would have scandalized her) and skimp on her commentary about human nature and society’s pressures. And plus her prose is just gorgeous and that is difficult to adapt to film. Probably the best adaptation is the BBC 1980 Pride and Prejudice miniseries ( wikipedia , tubi ) which was adapted by Fay Weldon, who was a novelist in her own right. That miniseries turns a lot of Austen’s prose into dialogue, which is beautiful to hear in that context, though as a consequence the series is a little slow for a wide modern audience. Really you have to read the books themselves.

      • ValiantDust@feddit.org
        7·
        8 hours ago

        She’s also incredibly funny (and sometimes savage) which also gets lost in many adaptations, since it’s in her commentary and not necessarily in the dialog.

        She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.